Allegory wrote:
lolgaxe wrote:
My mom still can't figure out the difference between Reply and Forward.
There isn't one, at least functionally.
Er? One replies to the sender (which may or may not include all other recipients), while the other sends it to a different person entirely. They are completely different. I suppose you could hit "forward", and then cut and paste in the list of original recipients, but that would be kinda silly. Forwarding is also useful when dealing with meeting invites, since you usually want to forward it to just the person you want to add to the meeting, but don't necessarily want to spam an entire list of people who already got the first invite.
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There also is no reason for carbon copy either, but it's still there as a vestigial relic of the past.
Yes and no. Old style email had just one "to" recipient, with everyone else being cc. Today, you can put a list of names on the to line and it works just fine. However, that's not to say that there isn't a reason to use the two different lines. If you deal with large amounts of email (like, say, several thousand a day), having a means to filter email based on whether something was sent to you directly, or you were merely cc'd on the email is kinda useful. Of course, this requires that the sender actually take a few seconds to actually separate out recipients based on this criteria, which is becoming increasingly rare. But for enterprise environments where you may be dealing with dozens of automated notification systems, separating out primary recipients from secondary folks who might want to know, but don't need to know (and can filter into an appropriate location), is very useful.
And of course, bcc is massively useful. Imagine this scenario. You need to send an email to 10,000 people to notify them of some important thing that's going on. If you just cc them all (or worse, put them all on the to line), guess what happens when say 1% of those people click "reply to all" to ask some question about the notification? Yup. 10,000 people each receive 100 emails (which is, for those keeping count, 1 million emails). Then, at least 1% of those people will angrily respond (also to all), to "stop spamming everyone with these emails", which, of course, just adds to the problem. In years past, we've literally seen email servers grind to an ugly halt from this. Of course, modern email servers use links to database segments to handle multiple identical emails, so it doesn't kill the servers anymore, but the recipients still get massive spam. Which is funny to a point. Then it becomes really not funny at all.
Yeah yeah, you can handle this with server based email flags (or email lists that tons of people are on, but only a select few can actually send to), so it's not a big deal these days, but these still assume a single server pool handling things. Which works for a single enterprise, but not so much for say large customer lists to individuals spread all over the place. So still useful.
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This is the pet peeve thread right?
Sure! Wait.. is it?